Astor Piazzolla was unique. As Max Miller used to say, “there’ll
never be another!” How true this is. Piazzolla was a man alone, possessed,
a real trail-blazer. He was also a thoroughly nice chap. I had the great,
good, fortune to meet him during his British debut, at the Almeida Festival
in June 1985. That year the festival featured Tango and as well as Piazzolla
and his New Tango Quintet, Yvar Mikhashoff introduced his International Tango
Collection, which consisted of 48 virtuoso piano miniatures. I was there,
paging turning for Yvar, and indeed, am the only person alive who was present
at that meeting of minds, when Yvar played Conlon Nancarrow’s Tango,
a work which to many would have borne no resemblance to the tango whatsoever.
Astor listened carefully, and at the end threw his arms in the air exclaiming,
“but it eeez tango!” He knew when a composer had broken the bounds
of tradition and created something new. And Piazzolla should have known about
turning a form on its head and re-inventing it for that is what he did with
the tango, in the process inventing what is now known as New Tango.

Piazzolla’s musical pedigree is impressive. He studied with Alberto
Ginastera, then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and it was she who recognised
where his future lay, “She kept asking: ‘You say that you are
not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?’ And I didn't want to
tell her that I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, ‘Then she
will throw me from the fourth floor.’ Finally, I confessed and she asked
me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took
my hand and told me: ‘You idiot, that's Piazzolla!’ And I took
all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two
seconds.” (from Ástor Piazzolla, ‘A Memoir’).

So, not for the first time, Nadia Boulanger sent into the world a major musical
figure whose work, like that of Copland before him and so many afterwards,
would enrich and delight us. Considering that he toured with a variety of
ensembles it’s a wonder that he had the time to create a repertoire
for them. Create he did, there’s an astonishing amount of music and
much of it has been arranged for various combinations, from solo piano, as
here, to string orchestra, soloist with orchestra and so on. If you’ve
ever heard Piazzolla and one of his many ensembles playing his music then
you’ll never want to hear this music any other way, for they are the
very best expositions of the works, played by the people for whom they were
created with the master in charge.

These versions for solo piano are very pleasing but lack the essential bite
of the music which is so noticeable in their band forms, and no matter how
good a pianist Delle-Vigne is, and he is good, I cannot warm to his interpretations
as I do to the originals. That said, this is a good introduction to Piazzolla’s
music and with such good sound, and at the price, it’s a bargain! Afterwards,
go out and discover the recordings of Astor and his New Tango groups.